Making a Living, Making a Difference

Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society
Erscheinungsjahr 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-024062-2
Verlag: OUP US

Buch, Englisch, 274 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 471 g

What do people do all day? What did women and men do to make a living in early modern Europe, and what did their work mean? As this book shows, the meanings depended both on the worker and on the context.

With an innovative analytic method that is yoked to a specially-built database of source materials, this book revises many received opinions about the history of gender and work in Europe. The applied verb-oriented method finds the 'work verbs' that appear incidentally in a wide variety of early modern sources and then analyzes the context in which they appear. By tying information technologies and computer-assisted analysis to the analytic powers - both quantitative and qualitative - of professional historians, the method gets much closer to a participatory observation of the micro-patterns of early modern life than was once believed possible.

It directly addresses a number of broad problems often debated by historians of gender and early modern Europe. First, it discusses the problem of assessing more accurately the incidence, character and division of work. Second, it analyzes the configurations of work and human difference. Third, it deals with the extent to which work practices created notions of difference - gender difference but also other forms of difference - and, conversely, to what extent work practices contributed to notions of sameness and gender convergence. Finally, it studies the impact of processes of change. Drawing on sources from Sweden, the authors show the importance of multiple employment, the openness of early modern households, the significance of marriage and marital status, the gendered nature of specific tasks, and the ways in which state formation and commercialization were entangled in people's everyday lives.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Eagren, Maria

Ågren, Maria

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Wirtschaftssoziologie, Arbeitssoziologie, Organisationssoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Acknowledgments

- Contributors

- Introduction: Making a Living, Making a Difference- Maria ÅÅgren

- Chapter 1: The Diversity of Work- Jonas Lindström, Rosemarie Fiebranz, and Göran Rydén

- Chapter 2: Working Together- Dag Lindström, Rosemarie Fiebranz, Jonas Lindström, Jan Mispelaere, and Göran Rydén

- Chapter 3: Marriage and Work: Intertwined Sources of Agency and Authority- Sofia Ling, Karin Hassan Jansson, Marie Lennersand, Christopher Pihl, and Maria Ågren

- Chapter 4: Less than Ideal? Making a Living Before and Outside Marriage- Hanna Östholm and Cristina Prytz

- Chapter 5: Constitutive Tasks: Performances of Hierarchy and Identity- Karin Hassan Jansson, Rosemarie Fiebranz, and Ann-Catrin Östman

- Chapter 6: The Dark Side of the Ubiquity of Work: Vulnerability and Destitution among the Elderly- Erik Lindberg, Benny Jacobsson, and Sofia Ling

- Chapter 7: Gender, Work, and the Fiscal-Military State- Marie Lennersand, Jan Mispelaere, Christopher Pihl, and Maria Ågren

- Chapter 8: Conclusion- Maria Ågren

- Appendix

- Bibliography

- Index

Über Autor(innen)

Maria Ågren is Professor of History at Uppsala University. She is the author of numerous works, including Domestic Secrets. Women and Property in Sweden, 1600-1857.